Chasing Justice: A Matt Royal Mystery (14 page)

“Why didn’t you leave your husband?” J.D. asked.

“Good question. I wish I had an answer. The shrinks have lots of answers, but I could never figure out which ones applied to me. I just stayed. A couple of months ago, a friend convinced me to take action. I did. I kicked the bastard out and got a restraining order. My friend gave me a gun, and I learned how to use it. I told Nate that if he ever came near me again, I’d shoot his sorry ass.”

“He believed you?” J.D. asked.

“Not at first. But the day after I served him with the restraining order, he showed up here and threatened to kill me. I stuck the pistol in his gut and told him I was going to pull the trigger if he didn’t leave.” She laughed. “I think he wet himself. I never heard from him again.”

“When was that?”

“Three weeks ago? I could check the restraining order, if you like.”

“That’s not necessary. Did you ever visit him in his new condo?” I asked.

“No. I had no reason to see the bastard.”

“Was Nate having an affair with Abby Lester?” I asked.

“I have no idea. I’ve never met Abby, but from what I hear, she’s not the kind of lowlife Nate was usually drawn to.”

“How long were you two married?” J.D. asked.

“Ten years.”

“How did you meet, if you don’t mind my asking?” J.D. said.

“Oh, I don’t mind. I was working as a bartender over at the Hyatt Regency on the mainland. He was a semi-regular and seemed a little shy. One night he asked me out. I was young and dumb and pretty impressed that this rich guy wanted to take me out. He brought me out here. He was a perfect gentleman. He was ten years older than me and divorced, but I had stars in my eyes, I guess, and they blinded me to the reality of that bastard. We dated for three months, and then had one of his judge friends marry us down at the courthouse.”

“When did the trouble start?” J.D. asked.

“About three months after the wedding. He came home drunk one night and stunk of cheap perfume. I accused him of screwing around and he hit me. Only once, but it gave me a black eye. He apologized and begged me to forgive him. What a crock. I didn’t realize that was the start of a ten-year ordeal.”

“Did it ever get better?” J.D. asked.

“There were some good times. Nate was very generous and we lived pretty well. He took me on some real nice vacations, and we got along most of the time. I learned to overlook his affairs and tried not to cross him on anything. I didn’t want to make him mad. I guess I was afraid of him, but I never really thought of it in those terms. Over the past couple of years, it got to the point where he’d beat me for no reason. At least, none that I could see. Just the meanness percolating out of his gut, I guess. Something went wrong at work, I’d get hit. Somebody dinged his car door in a parking lot, he’d take it out on me. He was careful not to hurt me enough that I had to seek medical attention, but it was pretty bad. I’m glad somebody killed the bastard.”

“Do you know a woman named Victoria?” I asked.

“Yes. She goes by Tori. She worked for him at a project he was doing over in Lakeland. She was his assistant on some other things he was doing, but she was pretty much running the Lakeland site.”

“You seem a bit skeptical about her job,” I said.

“She was his latest squeeze. She’s young and pretty and, I think, very smart. She has a degree in business. But there were problems. I’m not sure what they were, but I think Nate had given Tori too much responsibility and she was screwing up. He told me before I kicked him out that he was planning to fire her, but I think he was also trying to figure a way out of the affair he was having with her.”

“What can you tell me about Tori?” I asked.

“Not much. I only met her once, and that was at a cocktail party in Lakeland when Nate was setting up the sales office for the project. I think she’d just shown up and applied for a job Nate had advertised. My guess would be that it was her body more than her credentials that got her the job.”

“Where did she get her degree?”

“I have no idea. She might not actually have one. That could just have been part of Nate’s smoke screen. Give him a reason for hiring a hottie. Who knows?”

“Do you have any idea about who might have wanted him dead?” I asked.

“Sure,” Maggie said with a smile. “Anybody who ever bought one of his condos, or worked for him, or with him, or screwed him, or even met him. He was one mean and ruthless son of a bitch.”

There was nothing else. She was running out of bile, her anger dissipating as she talked, as if just telling the story unburdened her. J.D. and I left and drove the short distance to my cottage.

“She’s pretty bitter,” I said.

“I wonder why,” J.D. said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Yeah. She has a lot of reasons. Most of those are also reasons to kill him.”

“Do you think she did it?” J.D. asked.

“I don’t know. She had every reason to do so.”

“She lied when she denied ever being in his condo.”

“Yeah, I caught that. Her fingerprints were on the list Gus sent me.”

“Why would she lie about that?” J.D. asked.

“Maybe she either killed him or was there when someone else did.”

“There’s that. I wonder why FDLE didn’t charge her. She had a lot more reason to kill her husband than Abby did. Even if Abby was having an affair with him.”

“I’ve been thinking about that since Gus sent me the prints,” I said. “Charging Abby might have made sense if Maggie’s prints weren’t in the condo. But since they were, you’d think she would be the prime suspect.”

“Maybe FDLE didn’t know about the violence in their marriage.”

“I’ll have to look at the court file, but I’m pretty sure a judge wouldn’t have issued a restraining order without some evidence that Nate was at least threatening Maggie. That should have been enough, even without evidence of the beatings, to point FDLE or Sarasota PD to Maggie instead of Abby.”

“Maybe Gus can come up with a reason Sarasota PD didn’t follow up on that.”

“Yeah. I’ll give him a call.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Sunday brought one of those bright mornings we Floridians live for. The island lay still in the gentle sun, and the aroma of frangipani blossoms filled the soft air as J.D. and I jogged toward the beach. We crossed the dunes on the wooden bridge at the end of North Shore Drive and turned south. The Gulf was an infinity of turquoise, flat and inviting. The hard-packed sand squished under our sneakers, gulls cackled, joggers and walkers smiled and waved, the contrails of a high-flying jet slashed across the otherwise flawless blue of a crystalline sky. “Paradise,” J.D. said. “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”

“And you’re the angel that makes it complete.”

She punched me on my arm. “You’re a sickie, Royal.”

“You didn’t think that poetic?”

“I didn’t even think it was cute.”

“I guess we have a day with nothing to do,” I said. “You got any ideas?” I wiggled my eyebrows. Or at least I tried to wiggle them. It’s harder to do than you might think. It didn’t seem to make the impression I was trying for.

“We could go to the Longbeach Café for breakfast.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“Moore’s for lunch?”

“Okay.”

“Finish up with dinner at Mar Vista?”

“Is eating all you ever think about?” I asked.

“It’s all I’m thinking about right now.”

“So we’ll make a day of it in the village. Doing nothing.”

“Maybe Gus will call,” she said. “Or Detective Corbin.”

“Gus said it’d probably be Monday before he could talk to one of his buddies at Sarasota PD. And I doubt that the New Orleans medical examiner is going to spend his weekend doing an autopsy on as undistinguished a victim as Connie Pelletier.”

“You’re probably right.”

We came to the mid-rise condo building that marked the two-mile turnaround point for our four-mile run. I looked at my watch. Almost seven o’clock. We started back north, our breath getting a little shorter now. The conversation stopped, and we plodded on, making good time.

We cooled down on our walk from the beach to my cottage, took a quick shower, put on clean clothes, and walked back to the Longbeach Café, a tidy little diner in the same small shopping center that housed Tiny’s Bar. Bob and Shannon Gault were sitting in a booth. They waved us over and asked us to join them.

“You guys look pretty chipper for this early in the morning,” Bob said.

“She dragged me out for a run,” I said. “Kind of gets the blood flowing. How have y’all been?”

“Fine,” Bob said. “We just got back from San Diego and heard you’re coming out of retirement.”

“Sort of. I think I’ve got one more case in me.”

“We knew Nate Bannister,” Shannon said. “Terrible little man.”

Colleen, the owner and cook, came and took our order and left.

“How did you know Bannister?” I asked.

“We talked to him a couple of years ago about building our house,” Shannon said. “He didn’t get along with the architect, he didn’t like the plans, and he called me sugarplum and told me I had no business making suggestions to him about what kind of house I wanted.”

“Sugarplum?” J.D. asked, laughing.

“Yeah. I thought Bob was going to hit him.”

“I guess you decided to go with another builder,” I said.

“Yes. I think Bannister got the message when Bob kicked him off the property.”

Colleen brought our breakfast, and we ate as we talked.

“Did you ever meet his wife Maggie?” I asked.

“Once,” said Bob. “Bannister took us to dinner when we first contacted him about the house. We got rid of him about three weeks later.”

“What was your impression of the wife?” I asked.

“She seemed nice,” Shannon said. “Kind of quiet; reserved, I guess.”

“How did they seem as a couple?” J.D. asked.

“Fine,” Shannon said.

“Did you ever meet anybody else who worked with Bannister?” I asked.

“Just his assistant,” Bob said.

“Tori?”

“Yes. I think that was her name.”

“What was she like?”

“She seemed pretty much in charge,” Bob said. “At least when we were talking money. But one time he almost bit her head off.”

“Tell me about that.”

“I think she was talking about allowances for different rooms,” Bob said. “You know. Things like how much we could spend on crown moldings, flooring, that sort of thing. Suddenly, out of the blue, Bannister called her a stupid bitch and said he’d explain it all to us.”

“What did Tori do?”

“Nothing,” said Shannon. “She just sat there and didn’t say another word. I’d have slapped some of that arrogance out of him if he’d talked to me that way.”

Bob grinned. “I thought Shannon was going to take him out when he called her sugarplum.”

“There was something else,” Shannon said. “I think Bannister and Tori were having an affair.”

“What made you think that?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. There was just something between them. She was quite a bit younger than he, and he was certainly in charge of whatever relationship they had. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I’d bet good money they were an item. She looked genuinely hurt when he called her stupid.”

“She also looked mad as hell,” Bob said.

“That too,” Shannon said.

“Did you ever see them again?” I asked.

“I saw him a couple of times on the island, once at the post office and another time in Publix,” Bob said. “I just nodded at him. Never had another conversation.”

“What about you, sugarplum?” I asked.

Shannon burst out laughing. “That’s not funny, Matt. But no, I never saw him again. I did see Tori once.”

“Here on the island?”

“No. I was downtown with some friends having lunch and I saw Tori in a restaurant. She was sitting in a corner with a man about her age. Not much to him. He was wearing one of those tight t-shirts that showed off his biceps, only he didn’t have any. I couldn’t see them as a couple, but they were holding hands and talking quietly. Kind of looking into each other’s eyes. That kind of stuff. I don’t think she even noticed me.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“Two weeks ago? Maybe three. I can look at my calendar and pinpoint it exactly if you need the date.”

“Don’t worry about it now. Can you describe the guy?”

“He was skinny as a rail, but tall. It was hard to tell with him sitting down, but I’d guess maybe six-two. He had blond hair that he wore long. I don’t think he washed it regularly. That’s about all I can tell you.”

“How about eye color, facial hair? Any distinguishing marks?”

“I didn’t get a good enough look at his face to tell you about his eye color, but I don’t think he had a beard or mustache. No scars that I saw.”

“Are you thinking they might have had something to do with Bannister’s murder?” Bob asked.

“Not really, but you never know what’s going to turn up. I
am
sure that Abby Lester didn’t kill him. But somebody did.”

Bob looked at his watch. “We’ve got to go. We’re going to take the boat on a run down to Venice with Woody and Sue Wolverton and grab some lunch at the Crow’s Nest.”

We said our good-byes, and Bob insisted on picking up the check.

Our day was just as J.D. planned it. She sat on the patio reading a book, and I read up on case law to make sure I wasn’t missing something I’d need for Abby’s case. We walked to Moore’s for lunch, back to my cottage, more reading, more sunning on the patio, more conversation about things of no importance, then to Mar Vista for a light dinner and home to bed. Not a bad way to spend a beautiful Sunday in paradise.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Monday mornings are busy times at the Longboat Key police station. The cops who were off for the weekend are catching up on what had happened since their last shift ended, paperwork is flowing to the deputy chief’s office and on to the chief’s. The Sunday night shift is getting ready to check out for the day and the calls of snakes in pools and dogs loose on the beach start coming in. There is little crime on Longboat Key, but the island never sleeps. Dogs bark, neighbors quarrel, snowbirds drive slow on Gulf of Mexico Drive, raccoons raid trash cans, car keys get lost, lovers walk the beach after midnight, landscapers start working before eight; a never-ending litany of calls presenting problems that the officers respond to and sort out.